If you have Facebook, you’ve done it. If you’ve procrastinated, you’ve done it. I can say with confidence that nearly everyone who reads this article has fallen prey to clickbait at least once. I certainly have. But I’m finished; no more. Clickbait, as far as I can tell, has run its course.
Teshkeel Media Group bought Cracked magazine in 2005. The company moved the flagging publication, which Sol Brodsky founded in 1958, online and revamped its style of humour, where it thrived. In 2007, Cracked.com fetched several hundred thousand unique users per month (the lowly Obiter garners about 2 000). In 2012, there were 17 million unique users per month visiting the site. The turning point, argued Wired’s Steven Leckart in 2011, was when Cracked.com switched to list-based humour.
Leckart calls it the “listicle” – an article in list form. Cracked.com was the first to elevate this format to Internet prominence. Demand Media bought the site from Teshkeel in 2007, and this is when the lists began. Demand was, at the time, a more established version of BuzzFeed. They employed programmers who wrote algorithms that determined what people like. Demand, incidentally, also brought you Livestrong and eHow. Demand’s metrics showed that articles broken up into bite-sized pieces got more clicks, and so Cracked.com ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Viral Marketing and got us all cast out of the garden and into the wasteland of clickbait.
Jonah Peretti founded BuzzFeed in 2006. As the name would suggest, Peretti’s original mission was to create software that could detect viral Internet content, and then pass that content on to an editorial team that would curate a “front page” of top viral videos, images, and articles for your convenience. Pretty revolutionary for 2006 – Numa Numa guy had been online for two years at that point, but “Chocolate Rain” wasn’t even a gleam in Tay Zonday’s eye and Osgoode was barely a gleam in mine. It’s been a bumpy and eventful road to perdition for BuzzFeed since then.
Evidently, BuzzFeed and its peers took note of the explosive success of Cracked.com, and either arrived at the same conclusions with their own algorithms or decided that emulation was the sincerest form of flattery. However, BuzzFeed wasn’t content to stick to Cracked.com’s philosophy that any list should not just be interesting and humouous, but also informative (if only marginally so). Nay, BuzzFeed discovered that they could get just as many or more clicks than their competitors by producing lists of complete nonsense, as long as the title seemed interesting or amusing.
Interest is at the heart of clickbait. The words in the link are always more interesting than what awaits on the other side. This means that clickbait content producers don’t have to think about what they publish apart from its title, since all they want are the advertising dollars they collect with each click. Reader satisfaction is not part of their business model. In other words, clickbait is simply a new incarnation of sensationalism.
Sensationalism has always garnered clicks. We didn’t always call them clicks, but the principle holds. Newspapers sell more copies when the front-page story is sensational – that’s why we know so much about Rob Ford and so little about the Syrian Civil War. That’s why the Obiter moved more physical copies in December than it had all year – a perfectly explainable budget shortfall at L&L is more interesting than thoughtful commentary on a landmark prostitution decision from the SCC. That’s why, 30 minutes before the news airs, your local CTV affiliate shows a teaser about a local bank robbery instead of the weather. That’s why professors always tell you at the beginning of a lecture that they’re going to talk about the exam at the end of the lecture. It’s the way we are. As I write this, the 33rd President of the United States leers at me from the sidebar of the International Business Times website above a headline that reads “A month after JFK’s murder, Truman called for abolishing the CIA.” The words play on a popular conspiracy theory to bait web surfers. I clicked. Turns out that Truman’s opinion had nothing to do with his successor’s successor’s assassination. Naturally, I was flabbergasted.
The difference between newspaper headlines and clickbait is that newspaper readers always pay their two dollars and discover that there are a wealth of articles behind the sensationalism. Web surfers find only insipid tripe.
Luckily, clickbait offenders seem to be engineering their own downfall. I used to click. All the time. But I don’t click anymore. There are better ways to spend the time it takes for me to scroll through another 32 pictures of Jennifer Lawrence (ok, bad example). After years of being subjected to clickbait from Cracked.com, BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and now The Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Jezebel (oh, how the mighty have fallen), I am immune, and it was the easiest habit I’ve ever kicked. Eventually, readers will tire of finding nothing of value behind the sensationalism. Like the newspaper, BuzzFeed and its ilk will have to start supporting their histrionic headlines with substance, or people will stop clicking. I know I have.